This invention relates to methods and means for detecting people in image sequences, and particularly for locating people in video images to facilitate visual communication.
Locating people in video images can facilitate automatic camera panning, interfacing of humans and machines, automatic security applications, human traffic monitoring, image compression and other applications.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,086,480 attempts to identify people in video images by subtracting corresponding image elements of subsequent images, thresholding the image elements against a luminous threshold to eliminate noise, filtering and clustering the resulting data sets, determining the minimum rectangle which will contain the sets, generating a border of finite thickness around the rectangles, and generating a head code book from the elements in the original images that correspond to the elements represented by the respective sets of data that fall within the respective borders. The patentee assumes that there is a moving head within any image which will provide the subtracted output. However, if a person in the image raises a hand, the disclosed method may confuse a hand and a head.
An object of the invention is to improve systems for identifying persons in a series of images.
Another object of the invention is to overcome the aforementioned difficulties.